Get to know our ELBOW-team!
Associate Professor Soile Ylivuori
Project Leader
Associate Professor Professor Soile Ylivuori received her doctoral degree from the University of Helsinki in 2016, where her dissertation on 18th-century women’s subversive use of embodied politeness was examined by Karen Harvey (Sheffield) and Ludmilla Jordanova (Durham) and awarded the highest degree. Dr Ylivuori has previously held an Academy of Finland Postdoctoral Fellowship at University of Helsinki, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellowship at QMUL, and a Beinecke and Lewis Walpole Library Research Fellowship at Yale, as well as worked as a visiting researcher at UCLA and University of Cambridge. In addition, she was a Core Research Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies (HCAS).
She has published extensively on the history of the body, gender, experience, and the circulation of knowledge and power. Her publications include the monograph Women and Politeness in Eighteenth-Century England (Routledge, 2019) as well as peer-reviewed articles in journals including Historical Journal and Cultural & Social History. She is currently finalising her second monograph which engages with the history of embodiment, emotions, and experience by examining the 18th-century British Caribbean as a space of decomposition of bodies and matter.
Email me: soile.ylivuori@helsinki.fi
Get to know Soile, read the blog post!
University Researcher Stefan Schröder
University Researcher
University researcher Stefan Schröder, PhD, PD, works as University Researcher in the ELBOW-project. He received his doctoral degree on late-medieval travelogues from the University of Kassel, Germany, with the highest degree. Dr Schröder has previously worked as postdoctoral researcher at the Universities of Kassel, Erlangen–Nuremberg and Helsinki. Between 2015–2020, he held an Academy of Finland Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Helsinki. In 2015, he was granted the title Docent of general Church History and Cultural History by the Faculty of Theology at the University of Helsinki. In 2022, he was granted with the title of Privatdozent (PD) following the successful evaluation of his Habilitation at the University of Kassel.
He has published extensively on experience, cultural encounters, identity and alterity, uses of the past, conceptions of space and transcultural knowledge. An overarching question running through his research is how worldviews were shaped, used and changed in the long run through cultural (e. g. bodily, scientific, religious, social) discourses. He has published a book on “Otherness” in late medieval pilgrimage reports to the Holy Land (Zwischen Christentum und Islam. Kulturelle Grenzen in den spätmittelalterlichen Pilgerberichten des Felix Fabri, Akademie Verlag 2009) and written several related articles on travelogues as documents of life writing, cultural borders, history of the body, eye-witnessing as well as images of Islam and Judaism. Further peer-reviewed articles focus on the uses and functions of the crusading past in historiographical writings from later historical periods. His second monograph to be published in 2024 with Heidelberg University Publishing deals with the production and the transmission of knowledge in Arabic-Islamic and Latin-Christian maps.
Email me: stefan.schroder@helsinki.fi
Get to know Stefan, read the blog post!
Dr. Saara-Maija Kontturi
Postdoctoral Researcher
Dr. Saara-Maija Kontturi received her doctoral degree from the University of Jyväskylä in 2021. Her doctoral dissertation dealt with the development and professionalisation of physicians in Finland from c. 1750 to c. 1850. She has published on various topics in medical history, with specific interest in physicians, professionalism, medical uncertainty, the sociocultural elements of medical care and the doctor-patient-relationship. She also has an interest in digital materials and methods, and she has compiled a database of physicians in Finland from 1749 to 1856.
Before ELBOW, she worked as a researcher in the Research Council of Finland’s project Changing Attitudes towards Medical Uncertainty in the Training of Physicians from 1880s onwards: Finland in a Transnational Perspective in the University of Eastern Finland until 2023, and is one of the editors in the upcoming book Dealing with Medical Uncertainty in and through the History of Medicine (Brill 2024). Her more recent research activity has focused on professional authority in relation to medical uncertainty and the relationship of medicine and religion in medical practice.
Her former publications include, for example, an article on the transnational transfer of medical knowledge published in Healers and Empires in Global History: Healing as Hybrid and Contested Knowledge (Palgrave Macmillan 2019, eds. Hokkanen, Markku & Kananoja, Kalle); and an article on the construction and performance of medical expertise among Finnish district physicians published in Historisk Tidskrift för Finland, 2020:4.
Email me: saara-maija.kontturi@helsinki.fi
Get to know Saara-Maija, read the blog post!
MSS Edna Huotari
Doctoral Researcher
Edna Huotari, MSS, is a doctoral researcher in the ELBOW-project. Her Bachelor’s and Master’s studies were in social and moral philosophy and her current research investigates medical electricity through the framework of critical theory. She will be focusing on medical electricity as a case study in scientific knowledge construction and what this meant for the subjects of said treatment and their identities.
Broadly speaking, she is interested in analysing the categories of health and illness and their political implications. Her Master’s thesis argued that hygiene, on a societal level, can be used as a tool of oppression because it is a form of ideology, connected to eugenics. The thesis as well as her previous studies focused on Michel Foucault, critical theory, particularly on the works of Theodor Adorno, and Continental political theory at large. She is also a visual artist whose artistic work is focused on the arbitrary nature of scientific concepts. Studies (HCAS).
Email me: edna.huotari@helsinki.fi
Get to know Edna, read the blog post!
Dr. Annika Raapke
Postdoctoral Researcher
Dr. Annika Raapke received her doctorate from the University of Oldenburg, Germany, in 2017. Her PhD work focused on bodily experiences and narrations of health and sickness, as well as healthcare and body culture, in letters from the eighteenth century French Caribbean. She worked extensively with the Prize Papers collection at The National Archives, Kew, and the monograph based on her PhD thesis was awarded the Oldenburg University Society’s Award for Excellent Research in 2019.
Between 2017–2020, she taught History, Theory and Ethics of Medicine at the European Medical School Oldenburg-Groningen while working as Head of Public Relations for the prestigious Prize Papers Project. Moving to the University of Göttingen in 2020, she carried out her own research project on small-scale Pacotille trade in the Ancien Régime (funded by the German Research Association’s Walter Benjamin Programme) between 2021-23. In 2023, she took a position as Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Uppsala, Sweden.
She has published extensively on eighteenth-century bodily experiences of health and sickness, medical practices and health in relation to food, gender, and emotions. Her publications include the monograph ”Dieses verfluchte Land” – Europäische Körper in Brieferzählungen aus der Karibik, 1744-1826 (transcript, 2019), the recently published article Touch me if you can – Paper bodies in letters to and from the eighteenth-century French Caribbean (in Karen Harvey, Sarah Goldsmith, Sheryllynne Haggerty (Eds.), Letters and the Body, 1700-1830. Writing and Embodiment, Routledge, 2023), as well as articles in journals such as Itinerario, Historische Anthropologie and Historische Zeitschrift. She serves as one of the editors for the critical history-journal Werkstatt Geschichte.
Get to know Annika, read the blog post!
Editor’s note: Since September 2024, Annika moved on to new academic challenges – the whole ELBOW team wishes Annika the very best and thanks her for being a wonderful part of the ELBOW team!
MA Lotta Vuorio
Project Coordinator
MA Lotta Vuorio is a doctoral researcher in history at the University of Helsinki. Her PhD project, Moving Bodies – Materiality, Senses, and Exercising in the Late Nineteenth-Century England (2020–2024), examines the embodied experiences of exercising and moving one’s body in the Victorian era. During her doctoral studies, she did the entity of science communications studies that gave her the inspiration for thinking about the relationship between knowledge and communicating it to the wanted audiences.
As a fascinating side project, she has been the producer of a Finnish, history-themed podcast called Menneisyyden Jäljillä (On the track of the past) since the year 2020. Thus, she is interested in the way historical knowledge is represented and popularised through sounds and audio, but also through social media and YouTube-videos as well.
Email me: elbow.research@helsinki.fi
Get to know Lotta, read the blog post!
Sigrid Autio
Research Trainee
Sigrid Autio is a history student at the University of Helsinki. She is currently in writing her master’s thesis, in which she examines a manual regarding “women’s diseases”, written by a Swedish medical practitioner around the turn of the 19th century. She is mainly interested in 17th-, 18th- and 19th-century European history, and in the future, she hopes to continue working with themes like social history, medicine, knowledge production, and more.
Her essay discussing medical electricity and modesty is available on the ELBOW blog.
Raymond Sparks
Research Assistant
Raymond Sparks is the electric friend of our project, and with him you can follow how the project evolves. With Raymond, we explore especially the everyday life of our research team at our office, in conferences, and our workshops. Raymond is our research assistant specializing in research communications, and you can follow his journeys especially on our Instagram and Facebook pages.
Contact me: ELBOW Research Project on Instagram and on Facebook
Get to know Raymond, read the blog post!
Elbow 